


The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future

by justlikeyouimagined



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Potentially implied major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 21:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17670113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justlikeyouimagined/pseuds/justlikeyouimagined
Summary: "No matter how you land, the water’s surface will shatter your bones so effectively, you’ll howl, and beg, and demand you be given the death that you so narrowly just avoided."





	The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future

**Author's Note:**

> My contribution for the After The Fall micro-fiction zine  
> 

The trouble with falling from the edge of an eroding bluff is that you’ll have approximately 3.7 seconds to think about what is going to happen next. First, the nearly unavoidable truth will sink its teeth in: you are almost certainly going to die. That’s the point, isn’t it? How fragile your body will feel when suddenly you push out, away from the ground. What’s done is done though, so you’ll have 3.7 seconds to come to terms with it. Or not. It’s happening anyway.

Your mind, it’ll be racing. What if what if what if. What if, for some godforsaken reason, you don’t die? Well, wrapped around your becoming, his hands clinging tightly to your flesh, you’ll have time enough to consider what if. 

What if, perhaps, you twist enough to avoid a direct hit to the spine, to the head? Without trying to, your bodies have already started to pivot exactly so; natural survival instinct. But it’s a useless thing. No matter how you land, the water’s surface will shatter your bones so effectively, you’ll howl, and beg, and demand you be given the death that you so narrowly just avoided. 

So if you don’t die, then you’ll break. In that case, it will be the gluttonous water that takes you. Its icy prickling will suck your breath like a vacuum, it’ll feel as though your lungs have burst like a balloon blown up too taut. The waves will crest, then crash relentlessly against you, then drag you under so that it may devour. You’ll fight against it, of course, the best you damn well can... but you are exhausted, and the water doesn’t give a shit.

You will drown, you know. You, this broken, brittle, bloody thing. When the water’s fingers grip you, plunge you down where no way is up and everything is black, you’ll resist as long as you can. You’ll hold your breath as you will your body to cooperate, listen, listen, for one goddamn moment more. 

Go up. Just: up. When you think you cannot possibly last any longer - when your lungs are so achingly empty of air - you’ll still manage a bit more. Well, until you can’t. Until, eventually, the intensity with which your body screams to inhale will overpower you. Then it doesn’t fucking matter how much you won’t want to. It will happen anyway.

And so, if you don’t make it to the surface - and you won’t - then you’ll suck in a great lungful of stinging ocean water, and my God, will it burn. You thought you knew pain. 

But it will keep getting worse. You know. 

You’ll imagine this; imagine it with such perfect clarity that when it happens, it’ll be through the mystifying fog of deja-vu. But time is a slippery witch, and envisioning the ways you will die - are about to die - takes only a fraction of a second. After all this, you are still coupled, so entirely entwined. Only now, there is nothing left to do but fall.

If you are lucky, then perhaps time will play favourites: it will stretch out before you so those remaining three seconds will transform into a liminal space where there is no fourth dimension, not really. You might convince yourself that you and he will fall forever.

Beautiful.

For a moment, an hour, forever, he will look at you - _pay attention_ , he is looking at you now. You can return his gaze. Through the whirl of the whipping wind about your bodies, he says:

"I forgive you."

With those words, a portal: your time won’t end ruined by the waves, but deep underground, among the dark that smells of bones, and dirt, and fine leather. In the musty dampness of the catacombs, at last you will feel his steady heart against yours.

You’ll want to survive it, then. You will.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song of the same name by [Los Campesinos!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoIr60buB1I)
> 
> I'm on Twitter, Tumblr (kinda), Pillowfort as @trikemily - come say hi.
> 
> It was a delight to be part of this, thanks to those that made it happen!


End file.
